Australia's cybersecurity chief investigating Microsoft outage

The Australian national cyber security coordinator, Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, is investigating an outage impacting Microsoft's email and other online services, according to the source. Businesses, government agencies and other organizations have been affected as they struggle to regain access to their email and connected systems.

Microsoft acknowledged receiving reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily problems with Exchange Online, Teams, and SharePoint. The company stated it is aware of and investigating the reports.

Online outage reporting service Downdetector Australia recorded over 4,400 reports of problems with Outlook by 8:20am on Friday. An update from Microsoft explained that some servers had become unresponsive, possibly due to a component responsible for checking service health. The company is investigating recent configuration changes as potential contributors to the problem.

Some users reported that Outlook issues were also restricting access to other services, as they were unable to use two-factor authentication codes to log in.

Professor Adel Toosi, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, pointed out that the widespread disruption highlights the downside of relying heavily on a few major cloud service providers. While using cloud computing providers like Microsoft can be cheaper due to economies of scale, these services can become vulnerable if underlying flaws in their systems cause failures.

Professor Toosi emphasized that even though major providers typically distribute data across multiple geographical locations, they are still susceptible to such underlying flaws. If all affected servers fail, there is no way to recover the services. Microsoft mentioned testing an alternative method to check the health of some affected servers, which allowed those machines to return to service.

The company is applying this change more broadly and preparing an automated process to detect and restart servers that stop responding. At 8:41am AEDT, Microsoft issued an update stating it continues to restart and check affected servers before returning them to service.